Renaissance Newsletter #10

Knights of New Jersey - A new web series

…How did Knights of
New Jersey begin? What seed planted the idea of a sitcom about Renn
faires?

I was always intrigued
by the people who put [Renaissance faires] together. I don’t have a huge
background, I’m kind of an interested observer. I grew up in Rhode Island, we
would go to Renaissance faires in that area. It wasn’t until I started having
kids that I gave myself permission to start going again.

[Then] one of my sons
had a birthday party to Medieval Times. Off Route 3, not far where I live, in
Rutherford. That was the seed, professional people play acting. It’s a
spectacle, it’s cool but kind of silly. That was the inciting incident to
thinking about the characters and the scripts initially, and still is, for a
film.

Why did you pursue Knights
of New Jersey as a web series instead of a movie?

The rise of web video,
in particular a series called High Maintenance. You can take an idea and
peel it apart, do it in chunks. A web series gave me a new way of thinking
about the material. Instead of spending three years trying to develop and sell
a script, at the end not even have a film, we could just do it on our own.

Modern Renn faire culture is very layered now, especially
from “nerds” going mainstream to new people joining in the fun. What were your
impressions of Renn faires and the people who go to them? Who introduced you?

From my friends in the
Renn faire community, chief among them Sandy Spano with the New Jersey
Renaissance Festival Players, an acting group which is defunct. They validated
things I had written based on my own observations or out of my imagination.

I have a lot of feelings
towards [that] community, I’m in awe of them. What they do is terrific, it’s
fun and funny. All those threads combined into this, what would it be like to
work at a Renaissance faire and live that life. Regardless of scenario or
environment, people are people. They have goals, desires, obstacles. Just
because you’re in a “magical” environment doesn’t mean reality goes away. All
the emotions, politics [enter] fantasy, so to speak.

I’m familiar with faires, I go to the New York Renn Faire in
Tuxedo Park every summer. But I’ve never worked at one, so what do you mean by
politics?

It’s true. Faires have a
very political organization. There is a Queen, a mayor, and it breaks down from
there. The folks that toil in the trenches are looking to work their way up the
ladder to become literally royalty. Down from that you have the knights, the
ladies. You have street performers. You have folks just starting out. Any
organization, you learn the ropes and work your way up. It does parallel the
social strata they’re trying to emulate, which I think is fascinating…

The Global City:
On the Streets of Renaissance Lisbon

Recently identified by the
editors of The Global City:
On the Streets of Renaissance Lisbon as the Rua Nova dos Mercadores, the principal commercial and
financial street in Renaissance Lisbon, two sixteenth-century paintings,
acquired by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1866, form the starting point for this
portrait of a global city in the early modern period. Focusing on unpublished
objects, and incorporating newly discovered documents and inventories that
allow novel interpretations of the Rua Nova and the goods for sale on it, these
essays offer a compelling and original study of a metropoliswhose reach once spanned four
continents.

The
Rua Nova views painted by an anonymous Flemish artist portray an everyday scene
on a recognisable street, with a diverse global population. This thoroughfare
was the meeting point of all kinds of people, from rich to poor, slave to
knight, indigenous Portuguese to Jews and diasporic black Africans.

The
volume highlights the unique status of Lisbon as an entrepôt for curiosities,
luxury goods and wild animals. As the Portuguese trading empire of the
fifteenth and sixteenth century expanded sea-routes and networks from West Africa
to India and the Far East, non-European cargoes were brought back to
Renaissance Lisbon. Many rarities were earmarked for the Portuguese court, but
simultaneously exclusive items were readily available for sale on the Rua Nova,
the Lisbon equivalent of Bond Street or Fifth Avenue. Specialized shops offered
West African and Ceylonese ivories, raffia and Asian textiles, rock crystals,
Ming porcelain, Chinese and Ryukyuan lacquerware, jewellery, precious stones, naturalia
and exotic animal byproducts.

Lisbon was also a hub of distribution for
overseas goods to other courts and cities in Europe. The cross-cultural and
artistic influences between Lisbon and Portuguese Africa and Asia at this date
will be re-assessed.

Lisbon
was destroyed in a devastating earthquake and tsunami in November 1755. These
paintings are the only large-scale vistas of Rua Nova dos Mercadores to have
survived, and together with the new objects and archival sources offer a fresh
and original insight into Renaissance Lisbon and its material culture.

Jean Bretel’s description of the festive music and dance at
Chauvency c. 1310, set to music.

Le Tournoi de Chauvency, written by the French
poet Jacques Bretel, narrates a courtly celebration in Lorraine, and is the
inspiration for Anne Azéma’s musical theater piece “The Night’s Tale,”
presented by the Boston Camerata and the Longy School of Music at Pickman hall,
Cambridge, April 16th-17th. The poem, and this
performance, evokes festivities at the chateau of Chauvency. Daylight is the
domain of men, who joust and fight in ritual encounter; when night falls, women
converse in music and dance, far from the masculine violence of the daytime.
Mutual desire aroused during the day culminates in the evening’s rites —
aggressive and courtly, passionate and playful.

From Azéma’s program notes :

Why the
focus on the Tournoi de
Chauvency?

…It is an important source for the understanding
of medieval society from many points of view—literary, historical, visual,
aesthetic, and musical. It reveals much about love relationships and their
social context. The Tournoi text, a rhymed narrative of over 4000
lines, relates with verve and relish a weeklong program of combats and jousts,
and the amorous exchanges of a privileged, youthful European crowd. …

Yet
another reason for our interest in the Tournoi is its vivid evocation
of music, dance, and festivity. For all that, the manuscript contains not a
single scrap of notated music. To make our project function in the here and
now, the source itself urges us on. It obliges us, performers already familiar
with many dimensions of medieval music, to push our inquiries still further, to
create something new based on the skills we have already acquired in more
familiar, less enigmatic contexts. Important among these is the practice,
widespread already in the Middle Ages, of adapting or « twinning »
new texts to already existing medieval melodies. Using this and other
techniques we set out to create a new performance piece, meant to give delight
and pleasure, guided every step of the way by Jean Bretel’s narrative, so
generous and detailed in its descriptions of the festive music and dance at
Chauvency c. 1310.

We
cannot, of course, re-create with total precision the music of 1310. Even as we
proceed with as much care and respect for our sources as possible, using Douce
308 and related manuscripts of the period, we hope to avoid the pitfalls of
pseudohistoricism. Many decisions about performance style and manner must of
necessity be supplied by the performers and by the artistic director; we
embrace the large responsibility of making such decisions with humility, but
also with enthusiasm and joy. What we present is a work for our time, drawing
on the incredible life force that emerges from the manuscript’s folios,
redirecting this magnificent force, to the best of our abilities, into our own
ears, minds, and hearts.

Pomerium is a 14-voice
choir performs music composed for the famous chapel choirs of the Renaissance...

In a recent concert at the University of Notre Dame’s
DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.the choir explored the evolution of the sacred motet
from the time of Palestrina in the 16th century to Bach’s tenure in Leipzig in
the 18th century.

The program featured a
kaleidoscope of motet types: with continuo and without, single-choir and
double-choir, chromatic and diatonic, four-voice, five-voice, six-voice,
eight-voice, and 10-voice. The continuo group consisted of organ, viola da
gamba and violone.

Stile Antico
explores sensual music made spiritual during the Renaissance

Stile Antico,
twelve-person ensemble that was formed when a number of the singers found each
other and began performing during their years of study at Cambridge University,
has traced the blurred boundary between sacred and secular music in the
Renaissance. They encountered risqué, racy chansons transformed by Lassus,
Morales and Victoria into devout Masses and Magnificats, and ribald folk songs
worked into prayerful polyphony by Dufay and Taverner.

New Yorker critic Alex
Ross called his experience of a Stile Antico concert, "Perhaps the most
ravishing sound I heard this year." Steve Smith of the New York Times
concurred, calling Stile, "an ensemble of breathtaking freshness,
vitality, and balance." The Vancouver Sun called Stile Antico, "The
best and most exciting new vocal ensemble in the world."

Musica
Maestrale a Portland-based early music ensemble, brings together local
musicians with national and international reputations to perform the exquisite,
varied repertoire from between the 16th and 18th centuries. Using only
historically accurate instruments, Musica Maestrale explores the tone, depth
and character of the quieter, temperamental Renaissance and Baroque
instruments, and aims to provide an intimate musical experience. A recent concert
featured Mara Winter on the Renaissance flute, a notoriously difficult yet
hauntingly beautiful instrument. Musica Maestrale artistic director Hideki
Yamaya will also perform on the Renaissance lute. Included in the program will
be masterworks by Attaining, De Rore, Dowland and Palestrina.

Based in the
Pacific Northwest, Winter is a specialist in historical flute performance. She
can be heard performing chamber music on period instruments spanning from the
11th century to the present.

In the past she
has been featured at the Berkeley and Vancouver Early Music Festivals. Winter
has also performed with the historically informed Berwick Academy Orchestra
during the Oregon Bach Festival under the direction of Matthew Halls.